Low-Fat Diet and Chronic Disease Prevention: the Women’s Health Initiative and Its Reception

The Women’s Health Initiative Randomized Controlled Dietary Modification Trial was designed to study a low-fat diet, a nutritional approach to prevention of chronic diseases that was considered promising. The negative findings from the trial were both unexpected and disappointing to nutrition authorities. The authors’ public responses to the findings articulated an unwillingness to believe the finding that a low-fat diet did not prevent breast or colon cancer or heart disease. The negative results should stimulate work on alternate hypotheses, and reconsideration of the long-standing proscription against dietary fat.